Fun with Positron | Andrew Heiss – Andrew Heiss

submited by

Style Pass

2024-07-10 16:00:06

At the end of June 2024, Posit released a beta version of its next-generation IDE for data science: Positron. This follows Posit’s general vision for language-agnostic data analysis software: RStudio PBC renamed itself to Posit PBC in 2022 to help move away from a pure R focus, and Quarto is pan-lingual successor to R Markdown. Having the name of the main programming language in the title of things is out—providing more general tools is in.

Positron is essentially a specialized version of Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code, and is a fork of the underlying Code - OSS that powers VS Code. I’m super excited about this—in my own work, I use RStudio for most things R-related and VS Code for everything else (Stan, Python, HTML, CSS, Lua, LaTeX, Typst, etc.). VS Code is phenomenal and I love using it. It’s the best way to edit files on a remote server. It’s the best way to interact with Docker containers and Docker Compose. GitHub Copilot Chat is fantastic.

But for me, it’s never quite been a replacement for RStudio. Every couple months, I play around with trying to use VS Code for R work full time, but the constellation of VS Code R extensions (like the R extension and Radian for the terminal) and general R support has never been what I want, and I always end up going back to RStudio. Which is fine! I adore RStudio too and have been using it since it first came out in beta in February 2011 (13 years!).